How to Forgive When You Don’t Know How

By Jacqui Bishop MS & Mary Grunte RN

Foreword by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D.

Photographs by Mr. Jean Miele

Of the many good books on forgiveness, none gives such clear and practical strategies for resolving long-standing resentments as How to Forgive When You Don’t Know How. Here’s what you’ll find in this powerful book.

To begin with, the authors list, explain, and dispel the distorted thinking underlying many beliefs that keep people from forgiving. To forgive is no more than this: stop nursing judgment and anger toward someone or something—let it go.

Easier said than done, however, because we usually don’t know who is hanging on or why. 

To help address that issue, the authors introduce the concept of the Inner Family, a model of psychotherapeutic healing they presented in 1992 in their book How to Love Yourself When You Don’t Know How: Healing All Your Inner Children. 

In Inner Family language, the parts of us who resist forgiving are one or more Inner Children who are using magical thinking to stave off dangers from long ago. Inner Family Healing offers processes to connect with those Inner Children to: (1) relieve them of the need to be responsible for their own safety and (2) provide alternative ways to ensure their needs are met.

To help avoid generating resentment to begin with, the authors explain how to identify and correct dysfunctional patterns of interactions with other people (Games, grudge-collecting, and projection) in easily understood everyday language.

Finally, Bishop & Grunte present a variety of processes to help accelerate progress through the stages of forgiveness, as well as personal stories demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can free yourself of resentment over anything if you so choose. 

BUY NOW